Harvard Law students have started a campaign to drop the historic seal of Harvard because it is tied to an 18th-century slaveholder. The students organization, Royall Must Fall, have held campus demonstrations demanding the removal of the seal. The three sheaves of wheat on the seal come from the Royall family crest (which raises the compromise possibility of just replacing that portion of the seal attributed to the Royall family). Third-year law student Alexander Clayborne insists that the effort is part of “[o]ur larger goals include decolonization of the law school in general and decolonization of the law school curriculum.”
Category: Bizarre
We have previously discussed the curious pattern of people with past crimes seeking employment in law enforcement . . . only to end up as a defendant rather than an applicant. The latest to join this ignoble group is John Wesley Rose, 25, who applied for a job at a Michigan sheriff’s department despite an outstanding warrant in Kentucky on sexual assault charges.
Usually moments of silence are solemn and dignified events that can help heal wounds left in the aftermath of tragedies. Two such occasions this week however show how they can leave troubled feelings in their wake. The first blown event was G-20 Moment of Silence for the victims in Paris. The problem is that it turned out to be a G-19 Moment of Silence because President Obama walked in late. While one would hope that this deeply symbolic moment would be sufficiently important to get the President there on time, problems can occur. Yet, this President has been criticized for years for being consistently late to events, which shows a lack of respect as well as organization. This is one of the worst such failures in a long line of delayed arrivals. The second incident was far more disturbing in Turkey.
San Francisco police and prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation following the posting of videotape in the Mission District showing two Alameda County sheriff’s deputies beating 29-year-old Stanislav Petrov. Petrov is still recovering from his injuries and the incident is being compared to the Rodney King beating. The video shown below is quite disturbing.
Karen Keller of Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary on Bainbridge Island, Washington has a rather controversial approach to eradicating gender inequality in her kindergarten class: she reportedly bars boys from playing with Legos. A local paper below quotes Keller as saying that she wants to combat lower spatial and math skills among girls. While she says that girls want to play with dolls while boys want to play with Legos, she refuses to give boys permission to play with the Legos to try to reverse the trend. For many of us, Keller’s approach is not simply discriminatory but completely irrational and abusive. Yet, she clearly feels comfortable in adopting such discriminatory rules and speaking about them publicly. The issue is not the practices at Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary but the rise in such discriminatory practices — something that I have criticized through the years.
Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, appears to have rushed to show that extremists can be found on every side of a massacre. After the Paris attacks, Lior rushed forward to tell the world that the attacks were actually directed by God as payment for what Europeans “did to our people 70 years ago.” It does not seem to matter to Lior that France was one of the first to fight against Germany and was left in ruins by the Nazis. It does not even matter that this view of God would make the almighty as morally bankrupt and vicious as ISIS. In Lior’s twisted mind, murderous Islamic extremists were used by God to kill innocent people for the treatment of Jews in the 1940s. Makes perfect sense. It is truly impressive that extremists like Lior cannot resist seeing divine purpose in every act, even using ISIS as a vehicle for divine justice for Jews.
Dan Kimmel, 63, may have come up with the worst possible campaign statement for someone running as a candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives. The Democratic candidate tweeted that the Islamic State group “isn’t necessarily evil” and its members were doing what they thought was best for their community. Not only is the tweet bizarre but it occurred shortly before the massacre that left more than 120 people dead and more than 350 wounded in Paris by ISIS. Kimmel has since resigned from the race.
There was a controversial protest at Dartmouth this week that led to allegations in a conservative newspaper that racial epithets were directed at white students. The video below shows protesters disrupting students studying in the library and one telling students to recite “black lives matter.” The protest reportedly occurred at the Baker-Berry Library on the university’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire.
We have been following the rapid decline of free speech rights in Europe and Canada. Germany has long been the subject of criticism from the free speech movement. The country has long criminalized speech dealing with World War II and the Nazis. While the real benefit of those laws has been questioned given the long existence of a neo-Nazi groups in the country, prosecutors continue to bring troubling charges against those who voice unpopular or obnoxious beliefs in prohibited areas. The latest is Ursula Haverbeck, an 87-year-old German Neo-Nazi grandmother who has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of denying the Holocaust. She does not believe that the Holocaust was real but, rather than leaving the matter to open debate, the Germans are imprisoning her for either not changing her mind or not staying silent about her views.
In Missouri, there is a deeply unsettling crime involving two boys, aged 13 and 14, where Tanya Chamberlain, 43, was brutally stabbed in the face, neck, chest and hands. After killing her, the two teens went on a joyride with her dead body propped up in the front seat. The case again raises the question of when minors should be be tried as adults in our country.
We have been discussing the alarming erosion of free speech in Canada in the last few years — part of a trend in the West. Those concerns have been rekindled by the trial of Roy Arthur Topham, who was charged with promoting hatred against Jewish people through his website RadicalPress.com. He was arrested by the RCMP Hate Crimes Unit in 2012.
Continue reading “British Columbia Man Stands Trial For The Crime Of Criticizing Jews On His Blog”
There is an extraordinary verdict of of Seattle where Illinois businessman James R. Hausman was awarded $21.5 million in damages after he suffered minor brain injury when he was struck in the head by a sliding-glass door on the Holland America cruise line’s Pacific fleet flagship, the M/S Amsterdam. The videotape below does not exactly scream out liability, let alone massive punitive damages, but the unanimous 8-person jury clearly view the company as ignoring repeated injuries to dozens of passengers from the doors on various ships. The defense proved to the jury’s satisfaction that the company had shortened the time for the doors to remain open — allegedly to save money on air conditioning.
This week my two great loves have finally been joined. Tort law and football have come together with a lawsuit planned by San Francisco 49er running back Reggie Bush against the city of St. Louis for a slip-and-fall injury at the Edward Jones Dome during a game. With Raiders Linebacker Ray-Ray Armstrong reportedly under criminal investigation for taunting of a police K-9. As he ran out on to the field for the game against the Steelers at Heinz Field, this month is proving a virtual litigation scrum.
Continue reading “Reggie Bush To Sue St. Louis For Game Slip-And-Fall”
Raiders Linebacker Ray-Ray Armstrong is reportedly under criminal investigation for taunting of a police K-9 as he ran out on to the field for the game against the Steelers at Heinz Field. It is a crime in Pennsylvania to taunt a K-9. As many of you know, I am pretty over-the-top dog lover but I seriously question the need to criminalize such an encounter in the super charged atmosphere of a football game. Once again, I fail to see why such matters cannot be handled with a simple reprimand and an apology rather than criminalize thoughtless or obnoxious behavior.
We have another shocking video posted by police seeking a vicious attack on an elderly person by teenagers.
The two girls attacked an 87-year-old woman who was punched in the face and had to be taken to the hospital.
Continue reading “Police Seek Two Teenagers After Attack On 89-Year-Old Woman In England”